Harmony Korine

The cult director and his longtime music supervisor Randall Poster talk about the ecstatic, bass-bombing soundtrack of their new film, Spring Breakers.

If you want a high-resolution snapshot of American youth culture today, go to a Skrillex show. His live performance is a traveling vortex where bleeding bass, glow sticks, and throbbing moshpit-like mobs congeal into a democratized mass of debauchery. It's the type of scene that could've easily sprung from the imagination of Harmony Korine, the veteran cult-film provocateur and scholar of all things young, sweaty, and morally misguided. Korine has been to a Skrillex show; naturally, he loved it. The director's latest film, the violent day-glo adventure Spring Breakers, throttles out of the gate with slow-motion, close-up shots of very drunk and very naked young people dancing on a beach to Skrillex's blissfully bipolar, genre-defining "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites".

"When I was a kid growing up, these dudes rode around in boom trucks, playing bass-- a thudding sound, no words," he says, before imitating the low-frequency pulse with his mouth while sitting in Manhattan's Crosby Street Hotel last week. "I remember feeling it in my stomach. It was like bombs going off. And I felt the same sensation when I heard [Skrillex's] music. That was something I was trying to translate to film-- this kind of guttural, physical bass. I wanted the theater to shake."

Along with music supervisor du jour and longtime Korine collaborator Randall Poster (the mind behind the music found in everything from Rushmore to Zoolander), Drive soundtrack composer Cliff Martinez, and Skrillex, the director strung together a booming soundscape for Spring Breakers. The movie eventually moves beyond boob-shots and dubstep, digging into a rumbling Floridian hip-hop underworld that pivots around James Franco's cornrowed, gold-toothed white rapper character, Alien, and his rivalry with the villainous traplord Archie, played by an especially gruff Gucci Mane. It's a dream of a nightmare, and a nightmare of a dream.

And there's rarely a moment of silence in it. Along with bass drops and trap-rap, its backdrop includes early-aughts chart hits (Nelly's "Hot in Herre", Britney Spears' "Everytime") and Martinez's dreamy orchestral compositions. What the film lacks in tangible plotlines it makes up for in adrenaline-pumping jolts of volume and color-- you can almost think of it as a very long, entrancing music video.

Pitchfork: Who was the inspiration behind James Franco’s character? For a long time, Houston rapper RiFF RAFF took credit, but then it was revealed to be a guy from Florida named Dangeruss.

Harmony Korine: It’s such a tricky thing. That character was never based on a single person. It’s based on an amalgamation of a lot of people I knew growing up in Tennessee-- riding the school bus with white kids in cornrows who used to rap. I’m friends with RiFF RAFF, and his style is definitely in there. I originally wanted him to be in the sequence next to [Franco’s character] on stage. I was trying to put together a white-rapper posse. We sent RiFF an email, but his manager saw it too late.

But Dangeruss is the person Franco spent the most time with when he went to St. Petersburg. A lot of Franco’s mannerisms and cadences-- the more regional aspects, the details-- came from Dangeruss. But there were a million influences.

HK: I think there’s something amazing about what RiFF is doing right now. I’m aware of all that stuff, but to be honest with you, I’ve never been into alternative, hipster rap music. I look at WorldstarHipHop in the morning, Bossip, Global Grind, and everything in between, but it's all so quick, I don’t even think about it. And I’ve never been a fan of lyrical or socially conscious rap music. I just like the bass-- the thud, the groove, the grimiest shit. I like it when it’s just choruses and rattling bass, and I enjoy a vocal tenor and swagger that usually is associated with the South. Rap is the only interesting music left-- it’s the only genre that’s still pushing itself, and experimenting in a way that I find exciting. All that Chief Keef and Young Chop shit that came out last year, that drill music from Chicago, I thought was terrific. Gothic bass music. It’s very similar to music that I used to hear growing up in Nashville.

"Gucci Mane is trap rap's Frank Sinatra."

Pitchfork: Why did you choose Gucci Mane to star in this movie as opposed to any number of Atlanta trap-rappers?

HK: Because he’s the best trap-rapper ever, without question. To me, he’s the epitome of trap gone weird. There are guys who are more macho and gruff, and I find that pretty boring. Gucci’s rhymes are weird; his metaphors are so strange-- his whole thing is next level. What makes Gucci Mane Gucci Mane is like what made Frank Sinatra Frank Sinatra-- it’s just him. He’s trap’s Frank Sinatra.

Pitchfork: What are the logistics of getting Gucci Mane on board with a film?

HK: Brett Ratner, the director, had worked with Gucci on a Mariah Carey video, so I asked him to hook me up with Gucci’s manager. At the time, Gucci was in prison, so we called him in jail, and I said: “I have a part for you. As soon as you get out of jail, I’ll be waiting, just make sure you don’t reoffend.” He was really excited. And he didn’t reoffend.

Pitchfork: Did he choose the women in the scenes with him?

HK: I knew he liked thick chicks, so I would try to look for more meaty girls. I was getting most of them from these crazy black strip clubs in the outskirts of Tampa. I would tell him to pick the ones he wanted, but he just didn’t care. Even in that sequence where he’s having sex with that girl with the huge ass, he fell asleep while she was pretending to fuck him! She was riding his dick while he was snoring. He would also do these crazy things, like we’d be in the middle of a scene and he’d say, “Oh, I gotta go do a show, I’ll be back in two hours.”

Pitchfork: As a filmmaker living in Nashville, how do you become familiar with underground trap culture in Florida?

HK: I spent a lot of time in Tampa and started to network there. Certain people, real trap heads, are living the life. You piece it together and try to make things as authentic as possible. Some of the people in one of the scenes, for instance, were part of Gucci’s posse from Atlanta.

I didn’t even intend to make a film about spring break. It’s more of an impressionistic reinterpretation of all those things-- a pop poem. “Spring break” is really pretty fleeting in the film; I was more interested in Alien’s world. And then it becomes more about the trap houses, the neighborhoods off the strip, the faded yachts. A kind of beach noir. I always felt that Florida had this strange, sinister, magic vibe, and that’s what I wanted to explore.

Pitchfork: What compelled you to make Skrillex's music a central piece?

HK: I wanted the film to have a physical component and to be closer to a drug experience-- something that had an elevation, a transcendence, and then disappeared. Trance-like. His music was representative of that. It had all these pop elements, but also this bombastic and brutal electronic aspect. He’s also of that culture in a lot of ways, and a lot of those kids [in the film] would be listening to his music. I thought it would be interesting to put him with someone like Cliff Martinez, who I’ve admired for a long time. I thought the two of them had something that made sense with the images. They created a liquid narrative.

Pitchfork: You chose Britney Spears as a thread as well, but her music really predates the teenage girls featured in the film. Why Britney?

HK: Britney was the forebear to this pop insanity that seems to have taken over, she’s the best at that. This might sound crazy, but there’s something much more complicated in her music. On the surface, it’s poppy and airless and morose and beautiful, but underneath, I always felt like there was a violence and a pathology.

Pitchfork: She's kind of a tragic American hero now.

HK: It’s weird, though. She’s more like magic now. I don’t view her as tragic. She’s almost more than a person-- she’s like an energy.

Pitchfork: On the other end of that spectrum, there's Beyoncé, who never makes a mistake. Did you watch her documentary Life Is But a Dream?

HK: Yeah... what are you going to do? [shrugs] And someone like Taylor Swift-- my four-year-old daughter loves her music. I don’t find anything offensive about her, but it’s not my thing.